The hardest dish
There's a bias I hear often, even said kindly. "Ah, you do simple cooking." As if it were a step down.
A client once asked me why I don't try something more elaborate. One of those preparations with foam, the sphere that bursts in your mouth, three textures of the same ingredient on the same plate.
I asked him a question. Can you make a good tomato sauce?
Silence.
It's not a rhetorical question. A real tomato sauce — the kind that tastes of tomato and nothing else, not burnt garlic or added sugar to cover for a bad tomato — needs the right tomatoes, in the right season. It needs knowing when the heat is too high. It needs salt at the right moment, not at the end to fix a mistake. It needs the time to reduce without drying out.
It took me years to get it right. Some weeks, even now, it still doesn't fully convince me.
Nobody really judges the elaborate dish, the one with the foam. There's no point of comparison. Nobody carries in their mouth the memory of how a bursting gazpacho sphere is supposed to taste. So whatever arrives is fine. It's good because the chef says so, and no one can contradict it.
The tomato sauce, on the other hand, was made by everyone's grandmother. Everyone judges it, and they judge it by a strict measure — memory. Get the sauce wrong, and you're not just getting a recipe wrong. You're betraying a memory.
That's why simple cooking is the hardest kind. It has no tricks to hide behind. No plating to distract. There's only the ingredient, the hand, and the person eating, comparing what's in their mouth to something they've carried inside forever.
Gourmet cuisine is a recent invention. Pasta with tomato sauce is not. Before Michelin-starred chefs existed, there were people who knew how to boil water at the right moment, and not a minute later.
That's where I come from. And that's where I choose to stay.
Francesco Maria Aricò
Trattoria Privata · Private chef · Florence & Tuscany